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Childhood Memories Ruined by the Internet?
An anonymous reader writes "Remember that favorite cartoon you used to get up early every saturday morning to watch? Then remember how that part of your childhood died when you stumbled on that dirty piece of fanart based on it? Codehappy has launched a new site for you. Broken Memories is a website devoted to all the childhoods destroyed by internet fandom. Take a look at some of their discoveries, some of these things are just plain wrong."
The site is fairly sparse. I bet a google search would turn up many more hits than anything on this site.
Most of my "childhood memories" were ruined simply by me growing up and seeing those cartoons again on cable re-runs.
The crass corporate sponsored half-hour toy commercials that were the cartoons of my youth look completely different in my eyes today.
For every filter created there are two ways to circumvent them.
This sort of thing is for SomethingAwful, not SlashDot. this is a news site for geeks, not a site for people to point at something and go, "ew, gross!"
Grow up, anyway. If it can be corrupted by a sexual image, it has, probably a while ago. It's an irrevocable part of life, and not really something that deserves to be made fun of on a site devoted to geeky tech news.
Sounds to me like this site is more useful serving as a central point on the web as a listing of links to pornographic cartoons.
Mad Hatter
so naieve.
I posted on this site, but not for long. It's boring. Come on, you can only see pop culture figures turned into wank fodder about a dozen times before it gets dull. All porn in pretty much the same. Seeing one cartoon character take it up the pooper is about the same as any other character doing the same. I fail to see why people find this so entertaining.
Uhm. I'm sorry, but I think your childhood memories must be a bit broken already if it only takes a twisted fan site to shatter them. Get a grip and hit the back arrow if you stumble upon something on the 'net that offends you. Everything out there offends somebody on the 'net.
Oh no, you were exposed to someone else's thoughts and you didn't like them. Wah.
... Is this even about "broken memories" or "raped childhoods"? No. This is just a set of links to every dirty cartoon or story ever drawn. It's more like "cartoon porn paradise". So, nice try on the part of a bleeding heart /. editor to encourage censorship, but this story shouldn't have been approved. And nice job by the submittor to get a cartoon porn site on the front page.
Seriously, I understand where people are coming from on this - I, too, have a special place in my heart for the stories I read/watched as a young child - but what would you prefer? Censorship? There's not really a middle ground. You don't like it, don't look at it. Sorry if you got offended but that's your problem.
Now then, this site
My god... where do all these people who actually WERE "innocent" as children come from? Personally, I remember my wild childhood imagination thinking up scenes just as dirty as anything on the Evil Internet with my favorite comic book characters back when I was just 7-8 or so, and most of my friends back then were just as dirty-minded little bastards. Of course, sex and superheroes were both about equally "unreal" to us... Perhaps that's an excuse. :)
Not to mention that kids usually know their computer better than their parents do.
I wouldn't go so far as to say my childhood memories have been ruined by what I've seen on the Internet. Rather, it's been a great source for me to meet other fans of television shows, cartoons, and movies that I've been a fan of. There will always be the fringe element websites that spoofs or otherwise shatters the 'innocence' we had as kids watching these shows -- but why worry about it?
What I don't appreciate, however, is the fact that cartoons I used to view on TV have been severely edited to cut out "objectionable" bits. I guess that's what pisses me off the most. And to make matters worse, is the other crap on TV that's 10 times worse in terms of profanity and violence. As if kids aren't already exposed to this stuff.
Hypocracy lives!
Free Bob!
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Porn-a-tized comics/catoons have been longer than the web... how many faxes have I received over the years... each one degrading a little bit more as it gets passed along.
BBS' were pretty good about warehousing that crap too.
I personally will never get the image of bugs bunny in black face hawking war bonds. "Any bonds today, gonna buy your share of freedom?" Explosions may be one thing but watching your childhood memories as government sponsored bigots is almost as bad as that "fan art".
Haven't seen the infamous one where bugs is shooting the Japanese, there are probably only about a dozen copies of that one left in the world, but it's supposedly considerably worse.
they still shouldnt be censored out totally out, and pretend they never existed. if you never see any propaganda you might not be able to see through it when you stumbled upon it. you can watch posters without accepting the ideas too, they give insight to the feel of the times.
besides than that, censoring them partially is even worse, it's denying what the world was like when it was created.
the donald duck ww2 clip was quite good imho too.
'great is the man who can consider an idea without first accepting it'
to be partly on-topic, if your childhood memories get f*cked up by couple of adult oriented pictures featuring the characters, i hope you don't ever watch news about the state of the world.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, it was strange. Most of us watched tv till noon. THEN we went out and played, or read books. When you are a kid, you have after school and weekends to play. When you grow up, you hardly have it anymore.
*sigh*
Just made me depress myself.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Rule of the internet #1:
People on the internet are inevitably very very very very very wierd.
Rule of the internet #2:
Most of the people who spend a *lot* of time on the internet are sexually frustrated.
Conclusion:
These people are gonna make raunchy jokes about everything they get their hands on.
I don't understand this "Broken Memories" approach. Getting your favorite cartoon spoofed causes you psychological damage? GET A GRIP, DUDE!
GI Joe used to be so damn cool when I was a kid....so when I heard it was going to be on Cartoon Network I had to see it......first time it's on I'm like "wtf is this sh**??" And turned it right the hell off....
:P
The only thing that ruins our 'childhood memories' is knowing better now
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
While I think that most of this stuff is in pretty poor taste, Porn in general isn't what I would call "artsy", so when somebody creates a website of Pokeporn I am more inclined to roll my eyes and wonder why these people that in some cases actually seem to posses some skill at art, are wasting their time drawing genitals on cartoon animals and whatnot.
As for ruining my childhood, adulthood has done that with extream success, in fact there seems to be little left to ruin. At least old video games are still as good as they were back in the day (god bless emulation)
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Despite the best efforts of Corporate America, this kind of thing will always be. Once you publish something, the public owns it. Common people will do common things with your characters such as make them urinate. Of course, once the character is urinating it's not yours anymore is it? Cease and dissist letters will never stem the "abuse", though they will eliminate constructive uses. Before and after the internet, there are bathroom walls, tatoos and pamplets.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The war bonds commercial blackface incident I believe was intended to be strictly a parody of Al Jolson, as evidenced by the voice and the "Uncle Sammy" bit. Apparently Jolson was well know for his songs about "mammy," and also performed in blackface. Another interesting fact - the song, "Any Bonds Today" was written by none other than Irving Berlin if my memory serves correctly.
As for the one about shooting the Japanese ("Bugs Nips the Nips"), it's your basic Bugs cartoon with Japanese soldiers taking the part of the antagonists. There's some pretty outrageous stereotyping going on; the Japanese soldiers all babble continuously in some unintelligible pidgin and all have buckteeth. At one point Bugs even calls them some fairly offensive names, though never uses the most ugly one-word slurs.
I dunno. It was a different time, and most people didn't even know they were being racist when they did stuff like that. Plus, you have to remember that we were at heavy-duty, unconditional-surrender-or-nothing war with them - a common reaction is to try and dehumanize the enemy.
I'm not trying to excuse the behavior, which I find incredibly shameful, only explain it. For an interesting read on a similar topic, check out Roger Ebert's essay on "Birth of a Nation."
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
And let's not forget the same thing is still going on, if maybe a bit more subtle.
More subtle?
Check out some of the anti-Afghani and anti-Iraqi flash on Newgrounds. Watch the South Park episode where Cartman hunts down Osama. Watch any 5 minutes of SNL since 10/2001.
Nothing "subtle" about it. We still have the EXACT same xenophobic (I won't call it "racist", since racism only provides the material, not the cause) tendancies we did in WW-II. Not even toned down. The only difference? Japan and Germany have become "real" countries, while Afghanistan and Iraq still exist only for the convenience of US oil interests.
If you need a reason not to censor the foolishness of the past (or rather, need a "better" reason than the abomination of censorship itself, regardless of context), there you have it. Modern kids seeing Bugs make fun of the Japanese may cause them to ask some uncomfortable questions, perhaps even engage in a bit of easily-suppressed imitation. But without seeing how "silly" it looks in hindsight on a no-longer-unpopular group, no one will recognize the exact same crap applied to the newest unpopular-group-of-the-week.
Cultural heritage? Sure, it bothers me to see cartoons I remember fondly end up in tatters on the editing room floor. But it terrifies me to see people pretend we don't now, and never did, have a fairly ingrained habit of bigotry. We can work to fix what we recognize. We can't fix what we don't see as a problem.